


Unrest In The Forest

by sodium_amytal



Category: Rush (Band), Trailer Park Boys
Genre: 2spooky4me, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Crack, Crossover, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-25 16:55:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7540567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodium_amytal/pseuds/sodium_amytal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. Snakes & Arrows era. Paranormal investigators Geddy and Alex are contacted by Bubbles, who asks them to come to Great Bear River along the US-Canada border and investigate the disappearances of Ricky and Julian's jail cover trio.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unrest In The Forest

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically a comedic AU reworking of the TPB season 7 episode "We Can't Call People Without Wings Angels So We Call Them Friends." It's meant to be silly, so try not to think too hard about it. :P

"Rise and shine!"

Sometimes Geddy deeply regrets marrying a morning person. He groans a long, sleepy noise in his throat as Alex shakes him awake. "I hate you."

Alex scoffs at the empty threat. "You're only saying that 'cause you haven't had your coffee." He's still dressed in his pajamas—black sweatpants and a tattered Led Zeppelin t-shirt—and his laptop is open on the table and he looks way too fucking cheery for seven in the morning.

Geddy pulls the scratchy motel comforter tighter around himself, desperate for even one more hour of precious sleep. His eyelids slam shut as though made of iron. "And yet here you are, _not_ bearing coffee." It's like Alex hasn't learned a goddamn thing in their thirty-plus-year relationship.

"We'll get you a cup on the way to New Brunswick."

There are plenty of expletives that come to mind, but all Geddy has the energy to say is a drawn-out, Darth Vader-esque, " _Nooooooo_."

Alex tugs at the blanket, trying to pry it from Geddy's fingers. "We've got a case."

"That's an eight-hour drive."

"I'll do the driving," Alex volunteers, like he's doing Geddy some great service. "You can do research."

Geddy rubs his tired eyes and forces himself to sit up. Ever since he turned fifty, waking up each morning has felt more and more like climbing out of the protozoic slime, leaving him more exhausted than he'd been when he fell asleep. So it takes him a moment to get his thoughts in order and remember where they are and why.

Last night they extinguished a vengeful spirit by burning its bones in a nearby cemetery. Geddy has long since stopped questioning (and being in awe of) how weird their lives are, but Alex is still fascinated by the existence of ghosts and demons and all the other supernatural creatures they encounter on an almost daily basis.

They're nestled in a dingy, dated motel room just outside of Montreal. Early morning rays of sunlight fall between the edges of the curtains, threatening to engulf the entire room.

"So what's the case?"

"A couple of guys disappeared in the woods near the US-Canada border," Alex explains, tenderly sorting through Geddy's messy hair with his fingers. "Along Great Bear River. One of their friends called, said the missing persons were running an errand and should have been back within three days. It's been five and no word from them. Said some lumberjacks spotted them going into the woods, but not coming out."

"So why's this a case for us? Why not the cops or a forest ranger?"

"Well, I did some research, and there've been a lot of reports of mysterious disappearances around there." Alex moves for the laptop and drops into the chair, peering at the glowing screen. "It's an area that doesn't get much traffic, but last April two campers went missing. No bodies found. Then in '96 a total of four people disappeared there. Authorities claimed it was an animal attack, but no bodies were ever found. Same thing happened twice in '91, and once in '82."

Geddy chews the inside of his lower lip. "And?"

"And, get this, there are reports of people coming back from there and not being... right. Some of them have wild, vivid hallucinations that never wear off. Some of them have total amnesia—no memories of who they are—and some forget who their spouse or parents or family are. Or they misremember things that never happened, or that they weren't even alive for. In one case, a twenty-year-old came back from that forest swearing he witnessing Abraham Lincoln's assassination."

Okay, so maybe this is something up their alley.

"Plus, one of their friends called us." Alex lifts Geddy's cell phone, which has been resting on the table beside the computer, and jiggles it. "Seems a bit rude to turn them down, eh? And they don't really want cops sniffing around on this one."

Geddy thinks this over. An eight-hour drive means they need to head there now if they want to spend some time searching in daylight. The whole paranormal investigation business was Geddy's idea, so he probably shouldn't be an asshole when Alex indulges him.

"Alright, let's go."

* * *

Under an hour later, they're flying down the highway with hot cups of caffeine and a bag of greasy breakfast burritos. Geddy sips his coffee, balancing the laptop on his thighs while he scans the pages of data Alex saved to the hard drive before they left.

"So what's the verdict?" Alex asks, his mouth full.

"There doesn't seem to be much haunted history for the area. It's just wilderness. A whole bunch of nothing. Even on the other side of the river. But, given the location, there are a number of things that could be snatching up campers: Bigfoot, wendigo, crocotta, goatmen, fleshgaits..." Geddy shrugs. "Aliens."

"Aliens would explain why some people just vanished," Alex says.

"Not necessarily. Search and Rescue Officers have a lot of stories about unsolved disappearances in forests and national parks. And sometimes finding a body leads to more questions than answers."

"The woods are a big fat Nopeville."

"You grew up around woods," Geddy feels compelled to point out.

"Exactly."

Alex was born in Fernie, a small town in British Columbia surrounded by wilderness. His father was a hunter (the non-supernatural kind), and one night on a camping trip he had a bizarre encounter with an unidentifiable creature. A humanoid made out of raw meat and hair, like a roadkill sculpture. It wasn't long after that before Alex's family moved to the urban safety of Toronto. That was the story Alex told Geddy when they first met over forty years ago, and an unbreakable partnership was built on a shared affinity for weed, dick jokes, and spooky campfire stories.

Geddy takes a long swallow of coffee—double-shot with almond milk—and watches the steady scroll of countryside through the window.

Between the two of them, Geddy definitely looks the wimpiest: tall and skinny with long hair and a soul patch even Alex won't stop making jokes about in this, the year 2007. But Geddy was forged in fire, unflinchingly facing down soul-sucking demons, malevolent spirits, and flesh-hungry wendigos. Alex is the one who blinks first, who says an extra prayer before diving headfirst alongside Geddy into whatever ridiculous bullshit they come across.

"Why do you do it?" Geddy asks, and he doesn't realize he's spoken aloud until Alex responds.

"Do what?" The day Alex stops talking with his mouth full is the day the world hurtles into the sun.

"This." Geddy gestures to the interior of the car with his free hand. "Hunting. With me."

"'Cause we're partners," Alex says, like there's no other answer. That word has always rubbed Geddy the wrong way, like they're Batman and Robin, or cowboys in the Old West.

"Yeah, well, we don't _have_ to do everything together..."

"Ged, are you tryin' to tell me you need space?" Alex's voice lilts into laughter around the words, and Geddy feels his chest flutter.

"I haven't needed space in thirty-two years. But I don't want you to feel like you have to be here. If you wanna do—be something else."

"There's nowhere I'd rather be," Alex says, making it sound so easy, like he's never wanted anything else, anything more than this. "Have we seriously been together for thirty-two years? Wow."

"It's been too long," Geddy teases.

Alex laughs, smooth and honey-brown. "The next rest stop we see, I'm leaving you. I never wanna see you again."

That joking sentiment in the face of Alex's sincerity, of how he's spent the last forty-plus years by Geddy's side, Geddy finds absolutely hilarious.

* * *

It's around five in the afternoon when Geddy and Alex roll into the woods along Great Bear River, just a hop, skip and a jump away from the Maine border. Their clients—three guys next to a shitty, rustbucket car—are pacing and gesturing wildly on the side of the one-lane dirt road. Alex parks, and he and Geddy get out of the car.

"No sign of your friends yet?" Geddy asks before something catches his eye. Almost ten feet away, there's a black Monte Carlo half-submerged in the river, its ass end jutting out above the water, the trunk open flagrantly. "They're not in there?"

"Would we be standing around like a bunch of fuck-heads if they were?" one of the men says. He's wearing a checker-patterned shirt and track pants which seem to be falling down. He's also wet, as though he dove into the water to make sure there weren't any bodies in that watery grave.

"Ricky!" the second guy scolds. He's shorter than the other two, with short blond hair and a pair of glasses that magnify his eyes to an almost cartoonish size.

"Who the fuck are these jokers, Bubs?"

Geddy takes the opportunity to introduce himself. "I'm Geddy. This is my partner, Alex." There's that word again. "I understand one of you called us about finding your friends?"

"They're not our friends," Ricky says. "They're dumb-shits who cocked themselves over and fucked up. It's not our problem."

Glasses shakes his head in disbelief. He looks at Geddy. "Nice to meet you both. I'm Bubbles. That's Ricky, and Julian. I called you guys 'cause we don't want any cops, and I heard you two are the best."

Alex chuckles. "Whoever said we're the best probably had some pretty low standards." It's not like there's a Yellow Pages for this sort of thing. Maybe a Craigslist board. _Man seeking paranormal investigator who ain't afraid of no ghost._

The third man, Julian, who has been silent until now, finally speaks. "What do you guys do, exactly?" He has black hair, a tired expression, and a glass of some unidentified alcoholic substance in his hand.

"We're paranormal investigators," Geddy says. "We hunt monsters, demons, ghosts... Bigfoot."

Bubbles' already-huge eyes widen impossibly further.

Ricky snorts a laugh. "No shit? And you guys think Jacob and his stupid friends got eaten by Bigfoot? They probably just got kidnapped by dirty hill-a-billies."

"Look," Julian says, "let's just go find the tracks. They're probably still in the woods setting up. There's nothing else out here."

"Julian, no offense, but you don't know what's in these woods," Bubbles says, surprisingly confrontational. "They could be full of fuckin' grizzly whores or stupid drunk lumber-cocksuckers for all you know."

"He's right," Alex chimes in. "You don't screw around with the woods. If you guys are gonna try to find your friends, there's no harm in us coming with, right?"

The three of them go silent, as though guilty of some horrible offense.

Geddy thinks he knows the reason for their apprehension. "Look, we don't care if drugs are involved somehow."

"Yeah, look at him," Alex chimes in, sticking out a thumb at Geddy. "Of course he smokes pot."

Geddy lovingly smacks the back of Alex's head. "We're not gonna narc on you or anything like that."

Bubbles, Ricky, and Julian exchange glances, silently communicating in a way that tells Geddy these three have a deep, long-standing friendship.

"I'm not goin' in those woods without them," Bubbles tells Julian.

Julian sighs. "Alright. They can follow us."

* * *

"Why the fuck would those guys take their clothes off in the middle of the woods?" Ricky wonders.

After driving down the path for a few minutes, both teams abandoned their vehicles and delved into the woods when the clothes were spotted hanging from gnarled tree branches.

"Paradoxical undressing," Geddy says.

Everyone stares at him like he just sprouted wings, except for Alex, who's used to this kind of thing by now.

"Victims of hypothermia or overexposure hallucinate a state of extreme heat before they freeze to death," Geddy explains. "So they take off their clothes."

It has been almost four decades since Geddy moved away from home, away from his brother's smothering report cards and test scores, but he still feels the instinctual need to prove his intelligence (and, therefore, worth) to everyone around him. As though no one could possibly like him if he wasn't the smartest person in the room.

Ricky makes a face. "What are you guys, some kind of rocket appliances?"

Alex grins. "Geddy's the smart one. I just build stuff."

The five of them head back toward the dirt path, to their cars.

Ricky has a lot of questions.

"So how do you investigate this shit? Is there a monster-hunting school?"

"We're self-taught," Geddy says, crunching broken branches under his shoes. "We do a lot of research."

"And people just call you guys and ask you to bust ghosts?"

"Sometimes. Usually we look in the newspapers for suspicious deaths. 'Authorities are baffled' is always a calling card of the supernatural. Animal attacks in the middle of cities. That sort of thing."

"You guys've done this your whole lives?"

"No, no. God, I can't even imagine..." Geddy trails off, chuckling. "No, I used to be a paralegal at my brother's law firm. Alex was a pilot. I wanted to do something exciting, and Alex..."

Alex picks up that thread. "It was either this or learn to play guitar." He says it so flippantly, like it never mattered to him that hunting is dangerous at best and suicidal at worst. In the years they've been doing this, Geddy has learned that Alex will follow him into the dark with a smile on his face.

They pile into their cars and take the road, slowly rolling through the woods. Ricky leads the way in the shitmobile, with Julian sitting on the hood.

"So what do you think?" Alex asks now that they're alone.

"I think your casual self-deprecation breaks my heart," Geddy says, his hand sliding over Alex's thigh.

The corner of Alex's mouth twitches into a smile. "About the case."

"I'm not sure. The simplest explanation is they got high, got lost and disoriented, and probably died from exposure. But the history of this place raises a lot of questions."

Ricky comes to a stop in front of them. Julian slides off the hood. There's remnants of a campfire off the path to the left.

Julian hovers a hand over it. "It's still warm! Which means they're close. See, I told you Jacob wouldn't give up, Ricky!" He keeps searching nearby while Bubbles, Ricky, Geddy, and Alex linger around the campfire.

"How do we know that's their fire?" Bubbles says. "Anybody could'a had that fire going."

"Look at this." Ricky reaches into the charred remnants and plucks something out. He sniffs it. "Smells like my dope." He lights it, takes a puff. "It is my dope! It is them!"

Geddy glances at Alex. "Is this the part where I'm s'posed to ask what exactly those guys were doing out here?"

"We had a great fuckin' plan goin'," Ricky says, taking another hit. "We were gonna lay tracks for a model train to go across the border and transport dope."

Somehow, that sentence sounds more ridiculous than any explanation Geddy has ever provided for his supernatural career.

Alex's first question, of course, is: "Is it good dope?"

"It's the fuckin' best." Ricky hands the joint to Alex, who takes a puff.

"Shit," he chokes out, because it's been a while since either Alex or Geddy have smoked weed. "That's awesome."

"I know, right?"

Geddy waves off the joint when Alex offers it to him, because he wants a clear head, and it's not really Alex's to offer anyway. Alex shrugs and passes it back to Ricky.

"So this means they're alive, right?" Bubbles asks, pointing to the extinguished campfire.

"If we're being optimistic," Geddy says. This is looking less and less like a paranormal case and more like a couple of stoned idiots wasting their time.

* * *

Ricky ends up getting them lost, so they park and take a break while Bubbles refamiliarizes himself with the map. Alex and Geddy sit on the hood of their car, comfortably close. Alex has commandeered the joint, and Geddy occasionally waves the smoke away from his face, because someone has to have his wits about him here.

"It's starting to get dark," Geddy reminds him. "Do you really wanna be high in the woods _at night_?" He plucks the joint from Alex's fingers. "Just buy some for later. We can smoke it tonight, have sex. It'll be just like old times."

Alex stubs out the joint, pocketing it just in case. "Alright, boys," he says, sliding off the hood. "As much as I love jerking off on company time, we should probably get a move on. The woods are scary, and I'd really like to find your friends and get outta here before we have to do any traversing through the woods in the dark."

Julian has been ignoring them for a while, opting to search through his binoculars. "What's that over there, boys?" he says, pointing to something in the distance behind them. He hands the binoculars to Bubbles, who takes a quick look.

"It's a note pinned to the tree!"

Geddy was hoping the note might say something like, 'we've been kidnapped by wendigos' along with a detailed map to their location. Instead, it reads:

_We can't call people without wings angels so we call them friends. You may think I'm crazy, but the forest is alive. Alive, I tell you! Something's been stealing our track. Something's been fucking with us. I thought things were okay until last night but the angry monsters in the woods and the water and the trees are following me. We may not make it, help us please. Your friend forever, Jacob Collins._

"What's he talkin' about, the trees are followin' him?" Bubbles says.

Geddy turns the note over, still holding out hope for a map to their location. "How much of that dope did you give him?" he asks, giving Ricky a pointed look.

"You never heard of anything like this?" Ricky asks with a cocky smirk, like he thinks all of this supernatural stuff is bullshit: _Look at the crazy man with his crazy, stupid soul patch and his ridiculous glasses and his crazy fucking stories._

Geddy smirks back. _I could blow your fucking mind,_ he thinks. _If you ever saw the things I've seen, you'd never feel at one with the human race again._

"It's not unheard of. There's a bastard off-shoot of a djinn that feeds off fear instead of happiness," Geddy says. "You live out your worst nightmare. But djinn put their victims in a coma-like state, so how could Jacob have written the note?"

"Maybe they just got really fuckin' high," Bubbles points out. Mr. Reasonable. "Maybe they ate some wild berries that make you see shit."

Alex looks at Geddy. "A wraith?"

Geddy startles when a dire possibility crosses his mind. Alex's hand finds the small of Geddy's back.

"You got an idea?" Alex murmurs.

"Maybe... Let's keep looking."

They find the track laid in a tunnel that leads through the river and follow it back to its start in the middle of the forest. Clearly, the track is Ricky's priority, but Bubbles and Julian want to make sure Jacob and his friends aren't dead. Understandable.

With minimal arguing, the group of five delve into the forest as night falls. The moonlight barely leaks through the canopy of trees, so Geddy and Alex pull flashlights from their packs and switch them on, slicing through the darkness with bright cones of light. Geddy keeps Alex's free hand tightly intertwined with his own. If Ricky, Julian, or Bubbles notice the display of affection, they don't say anything.

Crickets chirp throughout the forest, and branches and dead leaves crunch beneath footsteps.

"Why don't we just go back to the car and set up camp?" Ricky asks, aggravated. "We can cook up some bacon. They'll smell that."

"So will everything else," Alex says.

"Ugh," Ricky groans. "This is fuckin' bullshit. I'm starving. Those idiots were just jail cover anyway."

Geddy oscillates the flashlight, trying to survey as much as possible. Just trees. Endless trees. Then the flashlight beam hits something that makes Geddy's heart stop.

Stairs.

In the middle of the woods. Inside a small almost circular area with no trees, as though everything has been cleared out.

A pristine, carpeted staircase, about ten steps tall. Like someone cut the stairs out of their house and stuck them in the forest.

Geddy freezes, fear hardening in his chest like lead.

"The fuck are stairs doing here?" Ricky asks. His voice sounds louder than before, and it takes Geddy a moment to figure out why.

The woods have gone silent.

Not even the buzzing of an insect.

"Does anyone else hear that?" Geddy asks in a hushed voice.

"Hear what?" Ricky says.

"Exactly."

The five of them take a moment to tremble at the silence. The only sounds Geddy hears are his own breaths and heartbeat.

"You think Jacob went up that staircase?" Bubbles.

"They don't even go anywhere." Ricky.

"Seriously, what's with the stairs?" Julian.

"Stairway to heaven, man. I'm climbing 'em." Ricky moves to cut in front of Geddy, but Geddy's not having any of this. He blocks Ricky's path and pushes him back.

"No, you're not. You see something that looks weird and out of place and your first thought is, 'I'm gonna fuck around with it'?"

"Yeah," Ricky says around a laugh. "What's the big deal?"

"The big deal is you don't know where they go," Geddy scolds. His voice is too loud against the muted forest. "Don't go up them. Don't even go near them."

Geddy jumps when he hears a crunching noise behind him. Alex has set his pack onto the forest floor. He unzips the bag and digs around, withdrawing an EMF detector.

Ricky is distracted by the machine that Alex is fiddling with. "The fuck is that?"

"Electromagnetic field meter," Alex says. The meter's electronic clicking noise pierces the silence. "Detects a supernatural presence."

"Bullshit. That's a busted-up Walkman."

"'Cause that's what I made it out of."

The meter purrs in a frenzy.

Alex glances around. "There aren't any power lines for miles..."

"So the readings are from the stairs," Geddy says, for the benefit of the other three.

"Holy fuck, boys," Bubbles whispers in terror.

"What happens if Jacob went up the stairs?" Julian asks.

"You read the note," Geddy reminds him. "Mind-bending hallucinations at best, one-way interdimensional travel at worst. No one knows, because no one's survived. If they did, they don't remember. Or it drove them mad. There's really no good answer."

"Those stairs lead to another dimension?" Julian says, skeptical, and the whole thing sounds really fucking dumb when he says it like that.

"They could. There are spots in the world where holes open up and swallow people. The Bermuda Triangle, the Oregon Vortex—"

"And stairs in the woods, apparently."

"Boys, maybe we should head back to the car and set up camp," Bubbles says. "And get away from these fuckin' things. They're creeping me out."

"Big fuckin' talk from a guy with a psycho puppet, _Conky_ ," Ricky sneers.

"Bubbles is right," Julian says. "Let's go to the car and cook up some meat. Maybe Jacob and his friends will smell it. We can bring them to us."

Geddy doesn't necessarily like the idea of drawing every woodland creature in a twenty-mile radius to their campsite, but it beats hanging around these creepy-ass stairs. And bears ain't shit when you've faced down demons and werewolves.

They set up camp near the car, complete with a small campfire. While Ricky grills the steaks, he talks. "What if it's just like taking acid? You see weird shit for a while then it wears off?"

"Then how come you haven't heard anyone raving about how high you'll get if you climb a random staircase in the woods?" Geddy says.

"'Cause it sounds fucking nuts, that's why."

"Because they never come down."

"Okay, fine. Tie a rope around my waist, have Julian and Bubbles hold the other end so they can pull me out if I get sucked into another detention or whatever Star Trek bullshit you think is gonna happen."

Geddy can't fathom Ricky's suicidal determination to explore the unknown. Sometimes you just have to walk away from what you don't understand, not go chasing it to indefinite ends.

"Say they pull you back. How could you be sure you're still you? You wouldn't even notice the change, but it would be there. Your memories could be altered so you wouldn't remember ever going up the stairs or what happened when you did."

"Then who cares? What I don't grow won't burn me, right?"

"Well, we know the stairs aren't one-way portals," Julian says, "because Jacob was able to come back and write the note he left for us."

"We don't know for sure," Alex says. "Jacob might not have gone up them at all."

Geddy claws his fingers through his hair, pushing it out of his face. "Why are you so interested in going up those stairs, Ricky? You have no idea where they go or what they could do to you."

Ricky turns one of the steaks, grilling the other side. "Why do you chase monsters?"

Well, Ricky just called Geddy right on out, didn't he?

Geddy struggles for an answer, a way to encapsulate into words his need to chase down this dark madness. "For one, I'm trained."

"You got a degree from monster school?"

Geddy digs into his pack and withdraws a worn, leather-bound journal. "This. This is a record of every single evil thing I've hunted or even heard about. Where it comes from, how to kill it. Decades of research. All right here. I know how to do this job. Amateurs don't. Amateurs get killed. Or wish they had."

Geddy notices that Bubbles and Julian have turned towards him to absorb the conversation.

"You didn't answer Ricky's question," Bubbles says. "How come you chase monsters?"

Geddy bypasses the too-pat explanation that involves getting lost in the woods when he was eight years old and seeing something not quite animal but not quite human in his peripheral vision. Or his parents' paranoia that their children would be stolen away in the night by a shtriga. Or his brother buying a house five years ago that was haunted by ghosts.

Instead, Geddy says, "I can't save the whole world, but I can try to save the little corner of the world that Alex and I have."

A smirk toys on Ricky's lips. "You guys are hobosexuals, aren't you?"

"Only when Alex doesn't shave for a couple days."

Alex snickers, playfully nudging Geddy with his leg.

This starts a lengthy discussion about their relationship: how they met, how long they've been together, when they got married, all questions Geddy and Alex are happy to answer at length. The five of them eat and drink and talk, and Geddy finds himself at ease, almost forgetting that they're in the middle of the woods at night.

They go silent when distant cracking sounds are heard coming from the woods.

Geddy perks up, his hand reaching for the gun holstered on his hip. Ricky already has his gun out and aimed at the darkness. The cracking grows louder and more frequent. Branches and dead leaves snapping under footsteps. Or hooves. Or appendages that are _supposed_ to be feet.

Alex, gun at the ready, grabs the flashlight with his free hand. When he switches it on, three human figures are caught in its spotlight. Some of them are missing various articles of clothing.

"Jacob, you stupid fuck, is that you?" Ricky says in recognition, but he doesn't lower his gun.

"Ricky? Julian?"

Ricky lowers his gun when he hears the familiar voices. Geddy and Alex know enough about fleshgaits not to be so cavalier.

"I can't believe you guys are still alive!" Julian says, as Jacob and his two friends step over fallen branches and foliage to reach them.

"Who are those dudes?" Jacob wonders, spotting Geddy and Alex. "And why do they have guns?"

"They're paranoid whatchamafuckits," Ricky says. "Ghostbusters or some shit."

"There's ghosts here?"

"What happened to you guys?" Geddy asks, lowering his gun slightly. "Your note said something about monsters?"

"I don't really remember," Jacob says, shrugging. "Ricky gave us some awesome dope, so we were probably just high." He laughs, which starts his friends laughing too.

"What about stairs? Did you see any stairs while you were out in the woods?"

Jacob looks at Geddy like he's nuts. "Stairs in the woods? Man, what are _you_ smoking?"

Fear coils in Geddy's stomach, an instinctual response to something he can't pinpoint. He tries to work through the thoughts firing in all directions in his brain, searching for the one that's making his skin prickle.

"Well, boys," Bubbles says, "I think we should pay these gentlemen for their help and spendin' their whole evening out here."

Ricky scoffs. "It wasn't even ghosts."

Julian rolls his eyes and digs into his jeans' pocket. "You guys don't charge by the hour, do you?"

Alex scratches his chin as though in deep thought. "Just give us seventy-five bucks and some of that dope, and we'll call it even."

Julian finds this agreeable, but Ricky is unwilling to hand over the weed.

"No way. They didn't do shit."

"Ricky, c'mon," Julian coaxes, a little irritated. "They came all the way out here to help us."

"Ugh, fine." Ricky ducks into the passenger side of the shitmobile and pulls a baggie of weed out of the glove box. "Here." He sort of flings it at Alex, who catches the bag with ease.

"Pleasure doing business with you," Alex grins, pocketing the dope for later.

Jacob and his friends pile into Ricky's car. Bubbles and Julian bid them goodbye before sliding into the car and crunching dirt and gravel under the tires as their taillights grow smaller.

A chilly breeze flutters through Geddy's hair, and he shivers.

"I need to see the stairs again," he says without preamble.

They plunder through the woods in the direction of the staircase. Geddy keeps his flashlight on a swivel. He doesn't know how long they walk, but he eventually finds the spot.

Only one problem: no staircase.

"It was here," Geddy says in a tiny voice. "You saw it."

"Yeah."

"So where'd it go?"

"Are you sure we're in the right place? At the risk of sounding... woods-ist, everything looks the same out here."

Geddy shakes his head. "No, no, it was in the middle of that clearing, remember? The circle." He stops talking, listening intently. But there's nothing to listen to. Just the empty vacuum of silence.

"It's quiet again," Geddy whispers.

Alex whips out the EMF meter and switches it on. The meter purrs in response, pointed at the clearing.

If there's electromagnetic activity, where is it coming from? Certainly not the staircase, since it doesn't seem to be here anymore. There aren't any power lines nearby or electrical devices.

An unsettling feeling crawls over Geddy's skin like spider legs. Something in this forest is telling them to leave. That they're not welcome. That these woods belong to someone—some _thing_ —else.

They run to the car. Geddy doesn't stop driving until he rolls into the brightly-lit town of Saint Stephen.

* * *

"Sylvan Dread."

"What?"

"'A term used to describe the, sometimes irrational, fear that people can feel in the woods,'" Alex reads off the laptop screen.

The motel is oddly cozy and smells like fresh linens and remnants of tonight's take-out. Geddy's nestled in the bed, sucking on a tightly-rolled joint he crafted from Alex's stash.

"You were there. Did that feel irrational to you?"

"You know how I feel about the woods. But it's not like you to get spooked so easily."

Geddy exhales a plume of smoke. "If you were smart you'd be spooked too," he says with a coy, teasing smile. "What does it mean that the stairs are gone? Maybe Jacob and his friends went up them, and they'll never remember. Or they were fleshgaits, and Ricky and Julian and Bubbles never made it home."

Alex shuts the laptop lid and swivels in his chair so he's facing Geddy. "Ged, worrying is my department, remember?"

"That note still bothers me," Geddy says, taking another drag off the joint. He stares at it pinched between his fingers. "You and I have smoked a lot of pot. But we've never hallucinated like that."

Horror blows the calm expression off of Alex's face. He knows exactly what Geddy's suggesting.

"So what the hell did those guys see out there?"


End file.
